OK, so I dreamt there was a VS.NET plugin that let me create data access methods by voice....

"I want all orders since an order date, sorted by order date, with customer info included"

Would that be so hard? It would create a GetAllOrders(DateTime orderDate) method that would return an entity collection sorted by order date with a prefetch on the customer table.

Sure would be sweet, eh? First we got over the hump of creating onerous data access code, by using LLBL, but now how do we get over the hump of creating tedious LLBL fetch code?

?

What you describe there is a fairly straightforward query. What is it that you are wanting to do that isn't working?

giggle ... actually, i can kind of see the point. i like working with with llblgen but a visual designer for code would be a cool addition. trouble is, every time i sit down and think about it, i have no idea how it would work still frans is smarter than me, so maybe he can figure it out Pete

But how do you work in an office using voice control. Can u think while sitting near someone saying... "SELECT... SELECT ALL... FROM... Hmm.... User"?

Yeah, I figure if Frans is smart enough to get us this far... :-)

How it would work in an office? Dunno, I telecommute! That said, I think if I worked in an office and something did this for me, I'd figure out a way to use a mic to use it..... Oh, I might bother the other people? true.... but I maybe I could get a corner in a noisy dept...he he he.

re: "what are you trying to do....", nothing in particular, other than not have to write so much data access code. I love LLBL and have been using it daily for 3 years (go Frans go!) for all of the projects I build/work on, but still, writing Prefetch yadda and sorter-dee-dah and cobbling together predicate expressions gets a bit boring, compared to writing "real" code (ya know, the non-plumbing stuff).

So how about a voice controlled IDE plugin that would understand my LLBL entities? I'm not asking for the world...it doesn't have to make a UI...it just has to build methods for my DAL. I'd even be happy if it got me half way there: just basic entity collection fetches with simple filtering, sorting and prefetch paths.

Now, if I could call up the IDE on my cell phone, tell it to write some DAL methods, then come home and clean them up, hmmmm.....

What worldspawn mentions is exactly why voice recognition hasn't taken off by now, even though voice recognition is pretty ok these days. What's also the case: some people type faster than talking, helped with intellisense. I mean '(', is typed faster than you can say 'open bracket'

And: if you say 'Open bracket', do you mean '(' or 'Open Bracket' ?

(and I'm not exceptionally smart )

For an office -> (Keep dreaming) Maybe using Sign Language with a webcam to capture your moves, and an engine to interpret the signs. Or maybe we just need a smart gloves with sensors and forget about the webcam.

But then we would have to learn Sign Language which is good to know.

And lets hope there is no-one in the background saying "just delete everything and start again"

Jackk100 wrote:

OK, so I dreamt there was a VS.NET plugin that let me create data access methods by voice....

"I want all orders since an order date, sorted by order date, with customer info included"

Would that be so hard? It would create a GetAllOrders(DateTime orderDate) method that would return an entity collection sorted by order date with a prefetch on the customer table.

Sure would be sweet, eh? First we got over the hump of creating onerous data access code, by using LLBL, but now how do we get over the hump of creating tedious LLBL fetch code?

?

This is kind of like the "English Language Query" in SQL Server, which never took off. It was way too difficult to setup and get it to do what you wanted to.

Still, there are tools out there now (code snippets and such) that you could use to get you most of what you want without annoying the guy in the cube next to you. Maybe we need to build a community code snippet library for LLBLGen or something?

Sign Language and a web cam...LOL!

Yeah, so maybe I'm dreaming, but still, there has to be some next generation for this stuff. It's just too wordy and redundant, no matter how much we squash it down and build frameworks to simplify things.

In general, I still find that writing SQL queries is much more succinct than LLBL 1.1 or 2.0, but I rarely use them, because LLBL is so powerful. This is especially true of predicate expressions. Offhand, I don't know how I'd append SQL "language" to support something like prefetch paths, but if I could (haven't really thought about it), it would at least be more pleasant....I think. Something like:

"select company, people by companyID"

would get me the company by companyID and all of the related people. Like I mentioned earlier, even something that would get me half way there for more complex fetches would be a real time saver.

I haven't looked at other ORM products lately, but I do remember seeing some more succinct syntax. What I'd want, though, is something that would just eliminate the copy-paste-adjust stuff I find myself doing frequently for fetches that have the same basic pattern, but on different entities with different prefetch paths.

Re: a community library, y, that would be sweet, but offhand I'm not sure how it would apply to the copy-paste-adjust world of cranking out DAL methods for a slew of different fetches against different tables with different prefetch path and filtering needs.

What I'd want, though, is something that would just eliminate the copy-paste-adjust stuff I find myself doing frequently for fetches that have the same basic pattern, but on different entities with different prefetch paths.

That's the same concept of code-generation. (with templates)

You can somehow use LLBLGen Pro code generator, to create those repetitive things. All you need to do is define those templates. And let it output those new files in the folder you want.

Yeah, we are looking at using the LLBL code generator as an option.

One thing along the "less repetition" lines we've started to do is save common prefetch path combinations in a hash where they can be easily reused by DAL methods.

We tossed around some more ideas last night about how we could maybe make a layer on top of the existing LLBL to make fetches easier (easier to us is a more compact syntax, possibly more like SQL, which we've been using for years and years). If we come up with anything interesting, we'll post it here somewhere.

This reminds me of some of the notions of graphical programming that were going to be the Next Big Thing a few years ago. But, like voice activation for programming, it is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Typing in code is the least time consuming part of programming. Working out what you are going to type is what takes the time. Now if someone could sell hats that had bigger brains in them, then we might get somewhere.